The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines biotechnology as “The application of Science and Technology to living organisms as well as parts, products and models thereof, to alter living or nonliving materials for the production of knowledge, goods and services.”

An enzyme which breaks down (hydrolyzes) starch, the reserve carbohydrate in plants, and glycogen, the reserve carbohydrate in animals, into reducing fermentable sugars, mainly maltose, and reducing nonfermentable or slowly fermentable dextrins.

In plant and animal cells, a process in which energy is released from food molecules such as glucose without requiring oxygen. Some aerobic plants and animals are able to use anaerobic respiration for short periods of time.

Total mass of living organisms present in a given area. It may be used to describe the mass of a particular species (such as earthworm biomass), for a general category (such as herbivore biomass - animals that eat plants), or for everything in a habitat.

Biological catalyst. The term enzyme comes from zymosis, the Greek word for fermentation, a process accomplished by yeast cells and long known to the brewing industry, which occupied the attention of many 19th-century chemists.

German-born US biochemist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1922 for his work in determining the relationship between oxygen consumption and the metabolism of lactic acid in muscle.

American biochemist. He shared a 1993 Nobel Prize in chemistry for devising the polymerase chain reaction technique, which is used in genetic engineering studies to make trillions of copies of a single fragment of DNA in a very short time.

Spanish-born US biochemist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for the discovery of enzymes that catalyse the formation of RNA (ribonucleic acid), in 1955, and DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).

British biochemist who improved paper chromatography (a means of separating mixtures) to the point where individual amino acids could be identified. He shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1952 with his colleague Archer Martin for the development in 1944 of the technique known as partition chromatography.